Feature Requests

Hey @veganliebe

Thanks for your message some great points in there!

I’ll try to address each point one by one:

1. Dynamic visability
Because each item (post template), in a layout is generated from a WP_Query – choosing what to show or hide becomes a bit tricky. Because the list is generated, its hard to “pick” a post, and do something with it (like add block visibility conditions) because that generated list of posts might change under various circumstances.

I think a practical solution (the only one I can think of right now) would be that you could modify the query to include / exclude what you want.

In fact, this is somewhat already possible (but requires a little coding). You can filter our query using the hook ‘custom-layouts/layout/query_args’:
https://customlayouts.com/documentation/action-filter-reference/

And from there, you can build out some advanced functionality. Showing/hiding posts based on user role would look something like this:

A. Create a custom field for your post type, that records which user roles are able to view the post (I tried looking for something premade for this like ACF but I’m not sure it exists) – then update your posts accordingly with the user roles that are allowed to view that post
B. Use our hook (linked above) to filter the layout query, so that only posts with the current users role capability will be displayed.

If you can handle a bit of coding, I would be happy to dive further into the logic of setting something like this up with you.

2. Theme fonts – this is a huge one, but a lot more difficult to tackle that I first thought.

Essentially the problem here is that in WP there is no standardised way of a theme to add a font, well not yet exactly. It does look like there is one way to tap into this though – page builders.

Page builders such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi and (soon) Gutenberg etc have design systems, and ways to implement fonts in a standard way. I think the plan for this is, to build integrations with each page builder, so we can detect and pull those fonts into our plugin.

Every other theme (not based on a page builder) could implement fonts in hundreds of different ways, and there would be no logical way we could detect those fonts, and offer them in our admin UI… The good thing about page builders is that they mostly standardise some of this, so we could add some code to extract that information and use it our layouts/templates.

Anyway, those are the limitations as I see it, we plan to add page builder support (for fonts and other styles) in the not too distant future – early next year I would imagine (there is a big update planned).

3. Additional image fields
Great idea, we’ve had a few requests for this already and it’s on our todo list.

4. Responsive in more places
Also planned! The truth is I’m not 100% happy with the current UI, so I didn’t want to roll that out across the whole plugin when I know its going to need reworking sooner rather than later.

Also, we’re kindof waiting to see what Gutenberg is going to do – its been in discussion for a long time how to implement responsive controls and there are some talented people working on making this a better experience right now.

My thinking is, like most of our UI, we’ll likely copy their implementation – because in the end it probably going to be easier to use that something custom we make, and also, people will be familiar with the gutenberg implementation (over time) as its the default experience shipped with WordPress.

Anyway, if they take too long on that front, no doubt we will cook something up ourselves!

——-

Also – I’m going to sticky this so other people can share their feature requests here.

Thanks for your feedback so far, and please do let me know your thoughts / any further suggestions.

Best

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Code Amp.
• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Code Amp.

Hello again!

As per my previous post, a few things I’d really like to see:

1. +1 for pagination styling (I know it’s been mentioned several times), with a custom CSS class. I’ve managed to style some of it, but it’ll obviously apply to all instances on the site which may be a problem later on.
2. +1 for theme etc fonts. I did see this isn’t quite as straightforward as you thought it would be, but if you could just include Google Fonts, that would be plenty for me at least!!
3. CSS class for Read More button itself, and/or more options to style the button (especially the hover). I added a custom CSS class to the Read more element, but it looks (to my very novice eyes) like it applies to the div or at least something above the button itself as the button itself wasn’t affected but the container (?right term) it sits in is. I’ve done some of what I want with global CSS, but obviously that means buttons on all instances on the site will be the same. I haven’t yet managed to get a hover effect to work on the button though, so the buttons look the same as others on my site (mind you, they don’t all look identical anyway – a job on my list to fix!)
4. Shadow options for the template and content/excerpt? Easy enough to add with CSS, but a whole lot quicker if it was available in the template editor!
5. Ability to put fields beside each other (eg date and author) – I’ve seen that someone got around this with display:inline, but I haven’t been able to get that to work.
6. Sticky post at the beginning? I’ve seen this elsewhere, but it’s not on this one…just the option to exclude the sticky post as far as I can see.

I think that’s it, for now at least ?? Again, thank you so much for what I believe is already the best post-grid option out there (and I think I know most of them, I spent days looking at them all!!!). Apologies if any of this is already in there and just my lack of knowledge/experience!!

C

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by cheekypoppet.

Hey again @cheekypoppet !

Thanks for your feedback too. To answer your points:

1. Yeah, we’ll be adding the option to build your pagination visually (just like with templates and layouts) – not quite sure yet on how to add this into the worflow of the plugin, but there will probably be a “pagination block” which you will be able to style / design.

2. While I have been thinking a lot about google fonts, there is another issue by doing this. If we add google fonts, and you choose to load a font that matches your theme, then the font will be loaded twice, which is really not ideal (additional requests will slow down your page, and font files are usually fairly large)…

Of course, I’m not saying we’re not going to address this, just need to do a bit more research / planning on the best way to approach this.

3. Yeah you’re right, the custom class goes on the container element (sometimes there is no container depending on various settings of the element) but it is the outermost element so you get more flexibility to control it.

If you were using the link element, with a custom class, and wanted to modify that with css, then you can use:

.customclass > a {

}

However, if you want to override styles our plugin has added in the css, you might need a higher specificity class:

.cl-template--id-2376 .customclass > a.cl-element-link__anchor {

}

You would have to replace the template ID and the customclass in the rule.

We’re hoping to make this easier.

4. Great idea, lets put that on the roadmap

5. This will be coming when we support columns / rows – part of the big update planned hopefully early next year.

6. If you don’t exclude sticky posts, you should get default WP behaviour which is to put the sticky post at the top of the list – is that no what you are seeing?

Thanks for your kind words and sharing your ideas!

Best

Hello again
Apologies, I thought I’d responded to this yesterday but it looks like I must have got distracted before I sent it!

Thanks for your response and feedback. Regarding point 6:

6. If you don’t exclude sticky posts, you should get default WP behaviour which is to put the sticky post at the top of the list – is that no what you are seeing?

I haven’t excluded sticky posts, and I’ve checked that the post I would like at the start is set as a sticky post – and that it’s the only one! In your layout preview, it shows at the beginning but it doesn’t on the frontend. It’s not a huge issue for me at the moment (due to implementing a little differently until you have a solution for the pagination issue), but it would be nice if it was at the beginning – and I guess it could be a bigger issue for others?

Thanks again.
C

Just putting in a feature request here for a filter button group above the post cards that can sort the taxonomies / categories of the posts in realtime on the frontend.

Thanks for considering.

Hey @cbitner – you can achieve this kind of functionality via our pro (paid for) search & filter plugin – setup instructions are here:
https://searchandfilter.com/documentation/search-results/custom-layouts/

I wish that the included CSS did not set things (unless set by the user) like font family, font size and such so that theme settings are honored.

Hey @sringwood I believe the font family is set to inherit if you leave it “default” so that should be taken from your theme.

Regarding the other options, I agree, we will try to be less opinionated – essentailly we need to allow our options to be “unset” and that means it will be taken from the theme instead.

But, the problem is many themes do not provide their styling automatically to wp-admin so our previews won’t look like what you see on the frontend – its super important for what you see in admin, to match what you see in the frontend.

If you’re using a gutenberg theme though, this should be possible once we make some changes to our plugin.

Can you tell me which theme you are using?

Thanks

I am using the Kadence theme.

Here is an example of what I am talking about: https://kadence.nevetssoftware.com/custom-layout/

I have not selected a font size for the teaser text and am expecting it to be 20px, instead it is 16px and from the Firefox inspector the size comes from /wp-content/uploads/custom-layouts/style.css?ver=9 and this rule

.cl-template h1, .cl-template h2, .cl-template h3, .cl-template h4, .cl-template h5, .cl-template h6, .cl-template div, .cl-template span, .cl-template a, .cl-template p, .cl-template img, .cl-template em, .cl-template big, .cl-template small, .cl-template strike, .cl-template strong, .cl-template b, .cl-template u, .cl-template i, .cl-template section {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
	outline: 0;
	font-weight: normal;
	font-style: inherit;
	font-size: 16px;
	/* font-family: inherit; */
	vertical-align: baseline;
	text-decoration: none;
	line-height: 1.2;
	color: inherit;
	border-style: solid;
	overflow-wrap: break-word;
	word-break: break-word;
	font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	box-shadow: none;
}

Thanks
Steve

Thanks for clarifying, definitely something that needs to be addressed – are you able to work around this in the interim?

Yes, I can work around it. Thanks